Storytelling combines the intensity of a solo performance with the intimacy of a face-to-face conversation.
"Storytelling at its best is mutual creation. Through the interaction between teller and listener, storytelling speaks to the inner child to nurture the human spirit." -
Ellin Greene, author of Storytelling: Art & Technique.

A STORIED
LIFEBY JOHN RODAT
First published April 10, 2003, in
Metroland -- The Alternative Newsweekly of New York's Capital Region

The
storytelling craft has been slowly and steadily reviving over
30 years, and its not just kid stuff

Kate
Dudding drops colorful stories and fables into her conversation
the way the stereotypical Valley Girl punctuates her sentences
with “like.” Fragments of her own biography trigger recollections
of stories she’s performed, which in turn spark similar tales
originally told by others, which in turn recall traditional
stories and their variants across cultures. Each is unfurled
with enthusiasm and spontaneity—rather than intoned by rote—and
Dudding hastens through some parts to get to the salient portion,
the feature of the tale that best illustrates the point at
hand, and there she lingers, allowing the listener to ponder
the heart of the matter.

It’s
not water-cooler talk, nor is it a guy-walks-into-a-punchline
comedy routine. It’s a story. It’s a narrative with color,
personality and atmosphere. For reference, comb through the
faded memories of a parent at your bedside, lighting up the
bedroom with “Once upon a time . . .” And though, Dudding
makes clear, storytelling is a vital and rewarding art form
for adults to practice and consume, her own origin as a crafter
of tales began at just such a bedside.

“The
first phase of my storytelling career began 13 years ago,”
she says. “I can pinpoint it because it was when my son was
4 years old, and he’s now 17. At that time, he said he wanted
a new story, not one in a book.”

Recalling the request, Dudding raises her eyebrows and adopts
a bemused expression, recreating a moment of maternal pause,
as if stalling: “Umm, OK, right . . .”

But she rose to the occasion, finding inspiration in biography:
“Eventually, I came up with, ‘Why don’t I tell you about the
time when I was a little older than you and I locked my parents
out of the bathroom?’ It had a bathroom, and in it you got
to do something mischievous to parents—so it was a big hit.”

Her son’s craving for originality and novelty was the impetus,
and a similarly innocent—almost randomly fortuitous—instance
introduced Dudding to the notion of craft in storytelling:

“My
brother lived in Michigan, so we had these long car trips
to visit,” she says. “I had a book catalog that had story
tapes. I didn’t really know what a storyteller was; these
were just amusements for the ride. But I really liked these
people—Odds Bodkin, and these others—not realizing, at first,
that they were telling the stories, they were not reading
a script.”

Dudding’s familiarity with storytelling might well have ended
there. Her involvement might never have progressed beyond
parental indulgence or road-trip pastime. She would have remained
a GE computer scientist by day, bedside yarn spinner by night.
But an unfortunate accident altered her relationship with
storytelling as a practice, and illustrated for her in a tragic
light its potential for emotional and cathartic force.

“The
thing that really propelled me into storytelling, and actually
got me to my first guild meeting,” she reveals, “was when
my best friend was killed in an automobile accident. That
night I couldn’t sleep, and I knew that I had to speak at
her memorial service. So, in good GE fashion, I wrote down
the speech and practiced it, but it meant so much to me I
didn’t know if it would mean anything to anyone else.”

Dudding’s attempts to wrestle her sadness into shape, to make
some sense of her pain, led her to the
Story Circle of the
Capital District, a group that meets monthly to practice storytelling
in a supportive environment. In the years since that first
meeting, she has developed her craft and her vocabulary, and
from her present perspective she speaks of that experience
as if recalling the chiseling of a sculpture as an apprentice
to a master.

She
cites the instruction of one of her teachers, storyteller
Elizabeth Ellis: “[She] says that when you’re a storyteller,
you’re taking the people on a tour. And like any good tour
director, you’re supposed to bring them back alive. . . .
[The Story Circle members] were very kind and gentle, and
one person said, ‘Once this story has a beginning, a middle
and end, it will be very powerful.’ And I certainly didn’t
have an end at that point, because it was only about a year
after my friend’s death and I was just coming up from the
depths of my despair. I was in no position to bring my listeners
back alive.”

Dudding has managed to format that painful memory, but she
has yet to perform it live.

“I’ve
never told that story in a formal setting, because I’m still
not quite over it yet,” she says. “But the written version,
which is at
my web site
,
goes through how much in common we had and the things that
we went through together, and how devastating it was when
she died. And then the things that have happened since—and
part of that is the gift that she gave me, because it was
my attempt to deal with her death that propelled me into storytelling.”

The ability of story to transform heartbreak to strength,
pain to power, confusion to clarity, is something which obviously
benefits children. Folklorists and child psychologists—not
to mention doting parents—have for years used imaginative
tales both to amuse and soothe their fretting or questioning
tykes. But, Dudding says, the force of myth, tale and fable
can work wonders for adults as well:

“Most
people think that storytelling is just for kids,” she explains.
“I have a bumper sticker that says, ‘Storytelling is not
just for kids.’ And it wasn’t just for kids until the
1800s, 1900s. That was how societies taught their values.
. . . All those Grimm’s fairy tales? Those were for adults.
That’s why there’s such brutal stuff. Each person puts a spin
on the story that makes it relevant to them, but that these
stories have survived thousands of years means there’s something
relevant for each generation. . . . Since becoming involved
with storytelling I think I’m much more actively curious about
the world around me, and when bad things happen to me, I process
it differently: I think, ‘Maybe this would make a good story.’
”

The crowd gathered in the Egg’s small theater for the capstone
night of the first annual Riverway Storytelling Festival was—we’ll
say—experienced. A quick scan of the 90-or-so heads revealed
a preponderance of gray. You could count the kids on two hands
(and the 20- or 30-somethings on one). Storyteller Fran Yardley
was up first, telling the audience about her late father,
a taciturn jazz drummer. The story was tightly constructed
and poignant. It flowed like a memoir excerpted in The
New Yorker—though it was given non-textual appeal by Yardley’s
sound effects. Relating a gently comic episode during which
her dad tries to teach her to play the drums, she reproduced
the sound of a snare: “Zta! Zta-Zta!”

A spoken reproduction of a drum’s sound was the last bit of
the story, as well. It was used effectively as an emotional
evocation of the teller’s now-dead father. It’s a device that
could only work in a spoken format, and the audience responded
favorably. (As they did to her following tale: an earthier,
comic story relating the scatological revenge of an Adirondack
camp cook on his blustery fellow hunters.)

Yardley was followed by James Bruchac, son of famed Abenaki
storyteller Joseph Bruchac. Bruchac’s approach was looser,
more immediate than Yardley’s. Where she stood at the mike
stand to deliver her stories, he wandered the stage’s edge,
mike in hand, speaking in a hushed voice and leaning forward
toward the audience to emphasize points and muted punchlines.
He told an American Indian tale of the mythic ancestor of
the Raccoon, in which Raccoon’s selfishness and betrayal of
some cooperative “ant people” robs him of his fleetness, leaving
him the rotund and plodding creature we know today.

The audience followed along attentively, laughing easily and
adhering to Bruchac’s instruction to call out “hey” each time
he calls “ho.” (An old American Indian storytelling trick
to keep the audience alert and involved, we’re told.)

The evening’s headliner was Laura Simms, a renowned Manhattan-based
storyteller and teacher. She presented traditional stories
from the diverse cultures she has researched and explored
first-hand: an Indian cautionary tale, a Bedouin folk story,
a fairy tale from Romania. The stories were traditional, but
Simms is sharp and has the recognizable caustic wit of a borough
resident. She referred back to a Bruchac comment about taxidermy
by ribbing, “I grew up in Brooklyn, and what do we call someone
who mounts animals? A pervert.”

She told of a prince from a fortified “kingdom of rules,”
and his circuitous route to find his true love, of his mistakes
and disappointments, of his struggle to overthrow arbitrary
behavioral proscriptions and obligations, to accept risk,
to sacrifice in the name of faith in love. It was an epic
and involved tale with wise men, a charming merchant, scheming
ladies-in-waiting, a helpful doppelganger, a warrior queen
and a grand battle. Simms told it with vigor, and obvious
enjoyment—cracking herself up at moments, even stopping the
story to point out, about a silly quip, “I made that part
up.”

By story’s end, the prince has—of course—found his true love,
as we knew he would. But, far from being pat, the resolution
of the story (which is also a resolution of the evening) was
heartening and provocative. All the stories presented—from
different traditions, of different materials and styles—told
of transformation and a shift in the balance of power. The
small overcame the large, the victim became the victor—and
strife resolved in concord.

When Simms pronounced finally, “May everyone go home, make
love, eat well, and care for their children,” it was a grace
note that could only have rung among adults for whom those
simple and wonderful goals sometime seem buried under all-too
literal trials and distractions.

‘I
was relieved when I started storytelling and I heard this
idea that you hear the story though the filter of you own
life,” Kate Dudding says. “I said, ‘You mean, there’s no one
right answer?’ That was very liberating for me.”

Liberating, she explains, because it allows the listener to
draw from the story the most relevant, most necessary message,
and to derive the greatest satisfaction and benefit from the
greatest range of material.

“Not
every story is for every person; not every storyteller is
for every person,” she allows. “But I like hearing all kinds
of stories because it might be a story I needed to hear—even
if it wasn’t a story I would tell.”

And in a world increasingly reliant on non-verbal means of
communication, Dudding believes others will find their way
into the story circles and that the movement will continue
to thrive and expand.

“My
guess is that as we become even more filled with technology
that the personal is going to become more important,” she
says. “That people are going to have to stop and smell the
flowers and listen to the stories.”